Last week’s Republican National Convention saw a blizzard of misinformation. President Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday was itself “a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history,” according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, which cited more than two dozen significant falsehoods in that address.
Trump and his allies warned, with classic demagoguery, of the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency with defunded police departments and invasions of the suburbs. They also conjured a kind of alternate reality, wrote my colleague, Toluse Olorunippa, one where “the coronavirus has been conquered by presidential leadership, the economy is at its pre-pandemic levels, troops are returning home, and the president is an empathetic figure who supports immigration and would never stoke the nation’s racial grievances.”
That is not the America that actually exists. Critics can credibly claim that Trump has goaded hard-line supporters into taking violent action against protesters. All the while, the United States inches toward 200,000 coronavirus-related deaths, maintains the highest number of infection cases in the world and has seen its economy crash by a third of its GDP. But none of this may matter for a president who sees stoking the country’s polarization as a pathway to reelection. Continue reading.